Gettin’ Hip to the Marlboro Vinyasa

Hey friends! We’ve got ourselves a new single! You can hear it here ! It’s called “Marlboro Vinyasa,” and it’s about the cultural collision of hippies and hicks. I’ll tell all about it below!

For folks newly added to the email list (we just did a big update), I want you to know: the new record, “The Universal Bubba,” is out November 6th, and it’s produced by Tyler Childers, honest-to-god country music superstar and good dude. You can get it here!

You’re also the first to see our amazing tour poster! 43 cities and more are coming. It’s prolly a little blurry, sorry bout that— tickets and legible listings.

Now, on to some yakking about songwriting and staying alive.

The “Marlboro Vinyasa” is surely the funkiest song on this record, although a couple give it a run for its money. I got the idea for it at a dive bar in Davenport, Iowa called “The Raccoon Motel.” Now, if you don’t know Davenport, Iowa, it’s one of the “Quad Cities”, a fascinating cultural melange of small towns and industrial cities on the Illinois-Iowa border of the mighty Mississippi river. It’s one of my favorite places on earth.

After playing a show, I got to gabbing with a barmaid or some such, and she told me about hosting yoga at the dive bar on the sticky floor, doing their breathing exercises while facing the Marlboro ad on the wall. I was still putting my instruments away when songwriter brain took over: country dive-bar tropes mixed with crunchy takes on eastern philosophy. The whole thing struck me as trying to write the moment in the movie “The Big Lebowski” where the cowboy Sam Elliot says “well, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, the bear, he eats you,” and the hapless Dude responds: “is that some kinda eastern thing?”

Why shouldn’t cowboy wisdom also be zen wisdom? Why shouldn’t it be dispensed in dive bars? Fuck, dives are the last place in America where everyone is on equal footing. Well, that and the public library, but it closes at 6 if you’re lucky. This song was also a great excuse to rhyme “zen monk” and “honky-tonk.” Tyler and the band made this one a lot better than my original idea, which was a pretty simple blues-shuffle, the kinda thing you’d hear on Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” and not in a good way. They make it cut-time, giving it a lot of space to groove and party.

Here’s part of the demo I originally sent to Tyler, done on my phone in haste in a closet:

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If you wanna hear the whole demo, I put it and some other personal oversharing at the end for the paid subscribers as a little treat! Thanks for putting gas in my tank.

I knew they’d make this song funky somehow, but I really owe this one to the rhythm section, Craig Burletic on bass and Hayden Miles on drums. They had the initial moment of “locking in” and hearing what I was thinking about the drums. I wanted it to sound like Levon Helm, and Hayden said, “everybody does, and they’re right.” Boom, groovy. Craig had the idea for the kinda “breakdown” in the middle, and does some truly cool things on a fretless electric bass.

On the homefront, we’ve been rehearsing for at least eight hours a week getting ready for this tour. Our newest band member Fritz Hutchinson plays drums and keys at the same time. It’s a sight to behold.

I’ve been playing oldtime music and drinking the occasional cocktail. I’m trying to drink less beer, a laughable endeavor. I’ve been reading “Yellowface” by RF Kuang (a frightening caricature of a white writer’s clueless cultural appropriation with dead-on takedowns of publishing) and “Lucky You” by Erika Carter (a former colleague’s novel about love, lust, and the mistake of joining an intentional community in Arkansas). I’m trying to get healthier, and it’s not going very well. A hard year for that, what with the hurt leg and all.

Personally, I am terrible at having time off. All that time hustling to make life steady, and now I’m used to unsteady. Over the last years, I have truly come to prefer the road. I understand my role as a human being more while playing music. At the same time, because it’s going reasonably well (read: gobsmackingly well) I feel like I should have something to show for it! I worry that a concert is only showing people the best parts of me, the extasis and the joy. I worry that I’ll struggle at home if I don’t get grounded in a hurry. I keep getting recognized in the grocery store in a way I never coulda expected.

Anyways, I’ve become sure that music and touring is my life’s work and the single best thing I can do for the people I love but only if I do it right. Doing it right means going past the moment, looking at things in a large context, showing up with my effort and my body and not with cynicism or marketing strategies.

As a folksinger with a lot of political material, opinions, and fury, I’ve often wondered why I am not more vocal or divisive on the internet, and the reason is I’m not a cynic. I’m not using my core beliefs as a bludgeoning tool to sell tickets with my (frankly, partially informed) opinions and ideologies. I believe in people, movements, not hucksters or opportunists. To do it right, I know I am here to play a good part in the coming mischief. But, I am not a gibbering prophet, narcissist, or revolutionary, just a fellow worker who enjoys his work and won’t quit until everyone else can too.

Towards that end, this tour is the fourth in a row we’ll have nonprofits and mutual aid groups at every show we can. If you or someone you love is a part of a worthy cause, consider filling this form out? We’ve got 100 submissions already for 43 shows, but we’ll be everywhere again, and some cities have given us a dozen, some zero. We’ll get the selected do-gooders in for free!

In an age of increasing inequality and divisiveness, I want concerts to foster solidarity among working people. Most music, even political music, doesn’t do this all that directly. This is one small way to make our social character more important than our social content. I hope our shows become a big tent where people share ideas, inspiration, and work! Where east meets west, where cowboys chant zen koans.